Girls' Night Outback
come from the land Down Under
I don’t know if you felt it in the air this past Saturday night.
Maybe you felt a tingle; a shiver up your spine.
You might have touched a doorknob and gotten shocked. Maybe you blew a fuse when you plugged something into a socket, and you had to go flip the breaker in a cold, dark basement.
Once downstairs, though, I’ll bet you found that you weren’t cold at all.
In fact, you were strangely warm.
I know why.
It was ladies. Hundreds and hundreds of (by my guess) mostly-straight-leaning ladies. All in one room. All wearing sequins or tiaras or sashes or bodycon pink dresses, all very drunk, and all of them screaming their motherfuckin’ guts out as ten oiled-up muscle-men in G-strings gyrated onstage in a synchronized dance number to Ginuwine’s “Pony”.
The sheer force of their horniness is what created the extra electricity on Saturday night. That was what you must have felt: a friggin’ magnetic field of horniness. An impenetrable fog of lust visible from space, the air a hot, humid night wafting towards you; the scent of 17 different brands of cheap vanilla sugar-smelling body spray thick in your nose and mouth.
Last Saturday night, Davin and I were at The Thunder from Down Under in Las Vegas, and I could not have been happier.
I’d wanted to see The Thunder from Down Under – which is a filthy men’s strip-show with an Australian theme – for more than a decade (the name alone!!) and never been able to do it. It wasn’t my fault; I’d been to Vegas a bunch of times, but it had never been for fun – it’d always been for a reason. I was in Vegas to work, or I couldn’t afford tickets, or I was there with a group of queers and somebody’s partner had loudly declared that they didn’t want to go see naked men dance, which, HELLO WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE ABOUT FLIPPING THE SCRIPT AND (CONSENSUALLY) OBJECTIFYING HOT, WELL-PAID MEN TO NUDIE-DANCE FOR THE FEMALE AND/OR QUEER GAZE!!!? STOP BEING BORING!!
Y’all. Y’ALL. The Thunder from Down Under was worth the wait.
Davin and I got there early. We settled in to watch a slideshow that featured slow-motion clips of shirtless men in the Australian Outback emptying bottles of water onto their chests. These clips alternated with large-font signs warning us that we were at a “sensual, highly interactive” strip show. You might be invited to come onstage or touch someone, the warnings said, and [in bold] participation is strictly optional.
Bachelorette parties started trickling in. Groups of older ladies in sparkly jackets came and sat down. Three black satin sashes that read “DIVORCÉE” trotted past our table. A buzzy roar began to build.
Davin and I got dirty martinis. We set them in front of us on a long table that stretched across the room. It was covered in grip-tape – the kind you put on the edge of stairs so no one slips.
“Weird,” I said, touching the grip tape.
The lights dimmed. As the first notes of Men At Work’s “Down Under” began to play, 250 pounds of almost-entirely-naked man hopped up on our table and started thrusting to the beat. Right in front of us.
There was frontal wobbling. The room erupted as men popped up everywhere; 200 women began screaming in unison.
Oh my god. EVERY FLAT SURFACE IN THE THEATER WAS COVERED IN GRIP TAPE.
I don’t know what to tell you. The Thunder from Down Under was a feast for the senses. There was an Army uniform number. There was a cowboy-hats-and-chaps number to “Old Town Road.” We saw butts. Every single butt in the cast. Every song featured many minutes of beefcake men coming into the audience and doing lap dances and placing women’s hands on their chests and inside their pants, and there was not a single person in the audience who was not fucking delighted. If you volunteered to go onstage, everyone cheered for you. A bachelorette was lifted over a dancer’s head as if she weighed nothing and then placed on an iron four-poster bed covered in furs, where the dancer graphically pretended to eat her out. A very suburban-looking lady was carried onstage by an absolutely huge Jason Momoa lookalike, set gently down on her back, legs in the air, and then MIME-FUCKED ACROSS THE LENGTH OF THE STAGE. There was a newsboy-hat-and-suspenders mobster number, which was not good because there is nothing less sexy than a lesbian cabbie hat, my GOD, and there was a fake orgasm contest, where women were invited onstage to make the best sex noises into a microphone, and one of the orgasm contestants was there with her MOTHER AND SISTER and proceeded to compete for the crown ANYWAY.
This video? this was EARLY in the night.
In the middle of watching six ripped men in thongs pretend (with enthusiastic consent) to gang-bang a thrilled-looking woman who was 75 years old if she was a day, Davin leaned over to me.
“I can’t stop thinking about how many eggs and chickens these guys must eat every day,” he whispered.
Honestly? As your lesbian friend in christ, I am here to tell you to buy tickets to The Thunder from Down Under the next time you’re in Vegas. You can’t imagine how healing it is to watch women loudly own their pleasure in a safe-feeling space, to watch hot grown men negotiate for consent with women in real time, right in front of you. I mean it. I was watching the dancers say to women who had been openly invited to touch them and were reaching to grope them that “if it’s OK, beautiful, I’m going to put your hands on my ass” and “Can I kiss your neck, gorgeous?” and “You can touch me if you want to, right here, sweetheart” then watch the women pass out from sheer joy.
I know that most of the dancers are statistically likely to be gay. I know that everyone was paying or being paid. And it felt like church.
Church if the priests were each 287 pounds of rock-solid muscle dressed in firemen’s hats, suspenders, and underpants, spraying fog from fire hoses into the audience while bad clip-art of barbed wire runs across the screen behind them for no reason.
Afterward, the women’s bathroom was peace on earth, the only place to be. Drunk women were applying lip gloss and hollering at each other how brave they were, how beautiful they looked onstage, how cute their outfits were. A woman in her 60s with a terrible haircut who’d been (with her thrilled permission) bent over a fake Cadillac onstage and humped was surrounded by admirers near the paper towel dispenser.
“You were amazing!!!” one girl in a “I’M 21 TODAY” glitter-sash cried.
“I’m getting married tomorrow!” the woman with the terrible haircut beamed.
“OH MY GOD YOU’RE GLOWING!!!” someone else yelled. “A BEAUTIFUL BRIDE!”
The entire bathroom line started clapping, and – two dirty vodka martinis deep – I felt tears springing to my eyes.
May every strip-show you see in the future be half as soul-filling.
And let me know if you ever want to go to The Thunder from Down Under.
We could get a party bus.
“How many eggs and chickens” killed me. 😂
Highly recommend Magic Mike Live for all these reasons.